In recent years, data center power and cooling have become important concerns in data center construction and operation. Industry participants have improved the efficiency of almost all the elements in the power and cooling chain, from individual chip efficiency, system design, and efficient cooling of the data center. Current operators can buy the highly efficient server designs in terms of throughput per watt.
Generally, there is no power limit enforced by a data center on the amount of power that servers and server chassis can consume. As a result, groups of servers connected to a power distribution unit are often conservatively allocated more power than they actually use. In order to avoid unnecessary power allocation to the servers, power capping may be used to safely limit the power that servers can consume at any given time. Ultimately, power planning with these limits can reduce the electricity costs of running the data center. Another challenge is to avoid tripping circuit breakers when hardware is added to a grid with a constant input power. Tripped circuit breakers can lead to cascading failures and result in financial loss. Power distribution schemes should also consider workload priority, with higher priority workloads receiving a larger power allocation.